[Foundation-l] Article Feedback Tool 5 testing deployment

Sat Dec 24 12:02:01 UTC 2011

On 24 December 2011 11:55, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:

> I freely admit I was being a bit flippant. But that was just because I knew
> I was in the right. Let us put it this succintly: "Being passive aggressive
> rather than aggressive about the way things are allowed as valid contributions
> to the encyclopaedia, is worse than being up front about it". Is that succint
> enough for you?

I always thought of it as a potential source of useful feedback for
those people most interested in editing the article and making it
good. (So I see v4 as not very useful in practice because approximate
no-one was providing said feedback, and hope the free comment box in
v5 will actually get used, there will be a little flag on the
watchlist when an article you're watching gets feedback, etc.)

I somewhat see where you're coming from - there's an observable
tendency to make Wikipedia less editable (hence the current en:wp
community largely treating new editors as a problem to be processed,
rather than as colleagues) and people who think like that will use
anything they can for it. I don't think AFT is an excellent tool for
this job, but we'll be able to tell it's successful when people start
trying to abuse the results.

- d.